Why are women silent?
Denise Saint Arnault, July 21, 2019
Gender Based Violence (GBV) is a pandemic phenomenon that is perpetuated in such a way that the victims are not only traumatized but also humiliated and intimidated into enduring abuse without complaint, and to maintain silence after these events befall her. Feelings of guilt and shame have been described in many places, however how these interact in the minds and hearts of survivors long after these events has not been as thoroughly discussed. We generally believe that if more women will talk about their experiences, this will perhaps help change the culture, showing the world the scope of the problem, thereby prompting social change. We also have the general sense that the women will also gain from talking about it; that breaking their silence and expressing their feelings about their violation will promote their healing. However, we have known for decades that one in four women have been abused or harassed, and that is it part of a larger sociocultural problem, often dubbed “rape culture,” yet social change is extremely slow. In addition, only a few studies that demonstrate that self-disclosure is therapeutic or that self-disclosure is, in itself, the gateway to trauma recovery (Androff, 2012; Herman, 1997; Stover, 2004; Wood & Roche, 2001). Research has shown that when survivors do self-disclose, it is generally to their medical practitioners, family, and friends (Ansara & Hindin, 2010). However, women are reluctant to disclose a trauma history from even these sources. Only one-third of Canadian women sampled from general practice office who had experienced violence within the last year reported their stories to their practitioner (Barrett & St. Pierre, 2011).
When exploring the survivor’s reasons for not disclosing their experiences, cultural and social stigma is described, and women also talk about how this stigma triggers the shame they already feel about their violation. Fugate, Landis, Riordan, Naureckas, and Engel (2005) reported interviews with 491 women from primary care services, finding that only between 20-35% contacted any formal source, and 29% did not talk to anyone about the violence (Fugate, Landis, Riordan, Naureckas, & Engel, 2005). One New Zealand study showed that while 700 women in their study did report their experiences, 40% said that no one helped them (Fanslow & Robinson, 2010). In an extremely large international study on Gender Based Violence, interviewing 42,000 women across 28 European Union Member States, the Fundamental Rights Agency found wide country level variations in rates of seeking help for harassment, sexual violence or domestic abuse, suggesting the importance of culture and society in self-disclosure (4-27% depending on the country) (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014).
The nature of the “telling the story.” Story-telling is a social and psychological activity that consciously organizes experiences within relationships across time, and also make commentary about moral beliefs about the actors in the story (Crossley, 2000). Humans telling and listening to stories is the way that we relate together and validate each other (Wigren, 1994). Stories generally consist of several parts. First, stories focus on what the experience felt like. Next, the story-teller interprets the aspects of the environment that contributed to the experience and their feelings within them. The story develops causal chains of events, creating a kind of series of related events (“First this happened, then this, then my situation, and after that, this and that happened…”). The story highlights commentary about the actors in the story, including the narrator, the other key players, and others related to the situation before, during or after. Therefore, stories are generally organized in time, both connecting experiences as well as separating experiences from one another in logical ways. As the story unfolds, the narrator (and the audience) also makes commentary about motivations, including the morality of the actions. These experiences, environments, actors, sequences of events, and motivations, create meaning, understanding, and insight. In the end, the narrator and the audience draw conclusions about the circumstances and the actors, and use these to guide personal identity, worldview, and future behavior (Schank, 1990).
Trauma, shame, and narrative. Some research has suggested that traumatic experiences may interfere with the coordination of logical sequencing, cognition, memory and emotional processing and storage, and social engagement after a violation. For example, when the traumatic experiences involve shock, the victim may perceive only certain aspects of the event in detail but may be less clear on other aspects of the situation. The stories formed during trauma are frequently incomplete, rich in emotional and sensation detail, expectations, and salient phrases or behaviors, but be less detailed in the higher order elements, such as environmental detail, sequences in time, or interpretations about cause and effect (Wigren, 1994). This incomplete recollection is well known to the survivor, who may relive the scenario again and again, trying to make sense of it. They are often painfully aware that their story is fuzzy in places, and they know that they don’t have answers to several questions, such as the when, where and why. Often, violations are terrifying events that are experienced as overwhelming emotion. These emotional memories are sometimes called “body memories” in which associated language is absent, and are experienced in memory as unbidden bodily sensations, visual fragments, dreams, and “unexplainable” feelings of anxiety or terror (Siegel, 2008). This awareness of fuzzy, incomplete and emotionally overwhelming recall introduces self-doubt, shame and fear for the survivor, stalling self-disclosure. The extent to which this psychological disruption or fragmentation creates a sense of disorder and incoherence depends on a host of variables, including ones past relationships and experiences, their personal identity, the circumstances surrounding the event, and the perceived implications of the event in their lives.
The willingness to expose ones confusion, shame and intimate experience rests on another host of variables, including cultural norms, available resources, expectations of behavior by others, and personal goals and expectations, complicating the already ongoing challenge of rebuilding a shattered sense of identity and meaning (Crossley, 2000). Some research has suggested that story-telling after trauma can “lift’ the memory out of the emotional realm of the mind, and into the brain for processing and storage within the conscious mind (Koch, Fuchs, Summa, & Müller, 2012). However, because storytelling involves connecting ones thoughts, feelings, context, relationships, interpretations and moral judgements, the act of self-disclosure after violation necessarily involves experiencing distressing emotional and sensory states, which may be void of time, sequence, and context. Self-disclosure feels at least overwhelming, dangerous, and unpredictable, but may also feel chaotic and unexplainable. Unfortunately, the not telling can make the violations an unclaimed and unarticulated set of experiences which remain silenced and unheard, disabling both recovery for the survivor, and social change for those who could make a difference (Bakan, 1968).
Shame. Shame is an intensely negative emotion that is related to personal standards about how one should behave in the world, personal responsibility, and perceived failures in personal responsibility. Shame is the self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other (Bockers, Roepke, Michael, Renneberg, & Knaevelsrud, 2016). Shame is especially, but not only, present is relationships of subordination and control, and is experienced as a family of emotions such as humiliation, disgrace, dishonor, and self-loathing. Shame also includes physiologic responses that overwhelm higher cortical functions like language, memory, temporalizing, and decision making (Herman, 2011). Shame is an element of a narrative in which the victims blame themselves, therefore becoming “the cause” in the trauma narrative. This feeling of shame is a belief about the self in the story; becoming a meaning construction that prompts more actions to keep silent, avoid being “found out,” avoid exposed, and can decrease emotional intimacy with others.
Culture and stigma. Violation occurs in a social context that includes expectations about behaviors and responses. Describing victimhood necessarily involves talking about ones roles within the cultural rules. Stigmatization is the cultural and social responses when one has not lived up to those expectations and rules. Research on why women don’t disclose after violation has shown that their reasons are often related to expectations that they will be stigmatized in one of three interacting ways (Westbrook, 2008; Murray et al., 2015). Internalized stigma takes the form of self-recrimination, such as feeling that one is weak, helpless, deviant, should be ashamed, or should be blamed (Westbrook, 2008). Social stigma is the fear that people will be unsupportive, won’t try or be able to help, will be unsympathetic, or will find their actions during the event (s) or after them as insufficient, weak or “stupid.” Cultural stigma involved cultural rules about violence or abuse, or judgmental attitudes, including norms that experiences of violation is a private matter that should be kept secret, or beliefs that abuse is normal, and/or beliefs that abuse always involves overt physical injury. Some research about cultural beliefs and domestic violence, for example, have described that the culture that supports domestic violence holds that the marital unit is the social priority, and is an institution that maintains the economic survival of the family, including women and children. In this cultural construction, the woman experiencing spousal abuse is seen as culpable and to blame for violating the normative gender and spousal expectations of a wife (Montoya & Agustín, 2013). She is therefore a threat to the moral order of the community, and the community, aligned with the husband, must act first and foremost to protect the moral order, and use various social control mechanisms to silence the victim, including shunning, gossip, ostracism, censorship and victim blaming. Extending this construction to “rape culture,” we might see the woman as a necessary object for the male, with social norms of behavior that she must gratify, soothe, take care of, pacify, demure or otherwise prioritize his needs. Tactics used in violation encounters will appeal to these expectations, shaming the victim, and making it clear that she “should” allow this by virtue of social custom, social convention, or her social role. Society is then enlisted to keep the secret with shunning, gossip, ostracism, censorship, and victim blaming. Unfortunately, many continue to participate (unwittingly or knowingly), even when she tries to tell her story.
Truth-telling and self-disclosure is a critical psychosocial act that is complicated or disabled by a myriad of interacting dynamics of the trauma experience, beliefs about personal responsibility or shame, and cultural rules for behavior. While it is possible that “women coming forward” is critical to social change, we, as the society, must hold ourselves accountable for our part in the silencing. We must consciously create spaces where women can tell their story they best way they can, without expectations of precision or logic. We must respond to that incredible bravery with real action to protect her and others in the future. And, we must have a space for the psychological and social aftermath she will face by doing so, shielding her from cultural humiliation and victim blaming. We must make a society in which survivors can tell their story in ways that will result in empowerment, self-mastery, and recovery, decision making and growth restoring action.
References
Siegel, D. J. (2008). The Mindful Brain: The Neurobiology of Well-being: Sounds True.